Digger Guestbook Redux (1995 to 2004)

Digger Archives Online Guestbook – entries, anecdotes, and associated material From: Billy Batman ([email protected]), 12/08/95. Subterranean whispers of maddening visions . The Digger Papers (August 1968) The Birth of Digger Batman by Kirby Doyle O sky glorious, O sky divine People dominions nations Heavens door O walking deliverance O Passage People O People Machines Animals Trees Towers & Bridges O Seed O colors Faces All Moving Things Life, hello . I want to tell you of the birth of Digger. Morning, about 9:30, July 5th, 1967 — clear and sunny upon the city, the sky echoing with happiness, the streets still and clean and just to walk on them is to be silent in the bright rising from the night after a big 4th of July electric music and free feed celebration out in the park where Emmett and the cooks from the Fillmore had made barbecue for about 4,000 people. I am up early and out into the street from Peter Cohon’s on Pine Street where the Communication Company lived — out and standing in the good day with the smiles all over me, just letting the warmth and the light honey about on me, my clothes glowing and the fine feeling seeping to the skin and a touch tasting to my innards, and O the head is just wanting to face with smiles in all directions. I had driven Susan Parker to the airport a couple days before and still had her car so I swings over a few blocks to Geary thinking to have coffee and a morning smoke with the Jahrmarkts, Billy and Joan and the kids. Up two flights, rap rap on the door and Bill answers to my hello half- dressed and happy. “The baby’s coming,” is what I remember of him having said. And there is Joan sitting in the sun of those bright windows looking out over downtown and the bay, sitting on the bed, the mattress inevitably close to the floor, and the three kids — Jade, Hassan and Caledonia — kind of hushed and happy because they know the baby is coming and have been waiting too. So Joany’s been in labor since the night before and now sits very calm with a $3 tin watch in her hand timing the contractions — about every 7 minutes and getting closer together. So me and Billy just standing there kind of stunned and sunny not thinking too much about what to do. “You got any arrangements made?” I says, and “no” is his reply. 2 It kind of goes like that, having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the warmth of the morning in the corner room with just one fact we’re standing in — the baby’s coming and we are smiling and blinking lumenant with speech in soft sounds. Nobody is thinking too much about hospitals though we figure lightly first about getting Joan into one of those places, but none too serious. I sound on Joan if she thinks she got time for me to go phone around and see what I can do, get help I guess is what I meant, and she says there’s plenty of time so I cut out and drive over to Margo St. James place on Nob Hill and start phoning. I get ahold of Kaiser Hospital and after about seven switchings back and forth I get ahold of some voice that says No, there is no chance of getting into their facilities without two hundred and fifty dollars in front even if the baby is on the way right now, and that the only thing that They, this voice, can suggest is to take The Expectant to County Hospital, which said set of instructions vis-a-vis that exhausted brick pile of agony so offends my ear I come near to throwing the phone across the room. So I phone Bill Fritsch to let somebody else know what’s happening (who tells Emmett who sends an ambulance which nobody quite knows what to do with except send it away). So I clean out Margo’s refrigerator of all its food and drive back over to the Communication Company where is lovely Sam and Cassandra and Claude and Helene who I break it down to. Right away Claude is on the horn talking here and there. I get Cassandra and head back to Billy’s, drop off Cassandra and split down to the store to get some smokes and am just rounding the corner on Geary when Claude pulls up to tell me he is on his way to Bolinas to get John Doss, a friend and Head of Pediatrics at Kaiser. Upstairs is Cassandra cleaning the kitchen, making coffee and a bit to eat for the kids. It is late morning now and we relax — everything seems to be going along unmolested by even the quiet logic of time — Cassandra softly busy in the kitchen, Billy sitting with Joan in the sunny corner room, the kids hushed and talking among themselves in their room, and I with the stillness of no thinking in my head gazing out the window under the Bat flag at the greenish dome of city hall. Rap rap on the door and I go to open it to Richard Brautigan who comes in under a soft tan hat, checks out the action, spots Cassandra in the kitchen, decides everthing is cool, walks once again through the rooms, tall, slightly stooping like a gentle spider standing up (We are all spiders, or ants, or something, I remember wondering, watching Richard putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out) decides to split. “Be back in a while — need anything?” “No, nothing.” out the door he goes. 3 It’s early afternoon now. Quite suddenly Joan gets up, walks into the kitchen and squats down flat-footed on the floor with her back leaning to the wall, contractions coming quicker, Billy kneeling with her, Cassandra calm, me getting nervous — smoking cigarettes. Knock on the door and in comes Claude and Helene with John Doss, way over 6 foot, a tower of a man with those huge gentle hands that by mere holding can take the panic from a hurt child. All of a sudden it seems we got the best. Right away he’s with Joan, coat off, talking real easy, squat’d down, laughing with the simplicity of things. Claude asks me if I want to smoke some gold and lays a joint on me — I take it and put it on Billy. People begin arriving — Billy Fritsch and Lenore, Bill much calmer than the day before in the park loaded on acid and telling Richie Marley real anxious, “There’s a warp in the continuum!” Emmett arrives. Diggers start coming. By now the kitchen is a place of prayer — Joan in labor on the big patch quilt now in the middle of the kitchen floor and around her kneeling and sitting silent people — silent and back within listening to what silence says at self to birth. John Doss moves in from the crowded front room every now and again and kneels his huge person down to speak quietly to Joan as he feels with those giant hands across her belly for the baby within. Billy squats Arab- silent flat-footed beside Joan, his hair long about his shoulders, staring into the thick air that holds the deep flux of his unspeaking Arab Prayer. Now the city has darkened for night, and Geary Street outside the window crawls alive with the homeward bound. Across the street the huge sign of an auto-agency BOAZ, in Hebrew “the lion hearted” — in black and white and red letters sends ancient benedictions into the rooms, and the green dome of city hall is alit as if it were a mosque removed one world and glowing not with bulbs nor candle but rather ringed with another light. Now from out the night John and Sara and Peter and Sam and Gandolf and Natural Suzanne and more Diggers arrive like a troupe or miming chorus bearing brown paper sacks filled with sandwiches — huge Poor Boys from some ecstasy delicatessen — the picture: Joan about to give birth on the kitchen floor, one dim shaded desk lamp by her feet, and a dozen people encircling her eating sandwiches and smoking weed, faces all in shadow of the only lamp. The contractions have begun to quicken and Joany is saying over and over again softly, “Come on little Baby . come on” — a little song over and over again directed inside as if by this time the intelligence of the as 4 yet enwombed Baby was beginning to be focused on its birthing passage by the soft speech of Joany’s song — “Come on Baby . come on little Baby . come on.” The labor was becoming long, more than 24 hours now and the concentration of Joany’s song had drawn the muscle lines tensed above her eyes pointing to a spot between them, slightly above them, and directly within. John Doss had a slightly worried look as his hands felt over her belly. He seemed to be trying to gauge the position. Reaching within he felt for the baby’s head which seemed to be turned in a wrong direction. The contractions were now great visible waves that moved down across Joan’s belly and with each one her tightened face appeared to have the full focused power of everything behind it pouring down through her body toward the slow and heavy workings and waves of force that carried the baby in its passage.

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